Quick Guide to Magento & Why It's Good For Your Business

Magento is a powerful, scalable, flexible, and user-friendly eCommerce system which gives merchants the opportunity to bring their products and services to the digital world. It is open source and easily customizable, making the Magento platform a great choice for business owners who want a cost effective way to launch an eCommerce website that is tailored to their needs.

Magento has many features, including (but not limited to):

Client Accounts - allow customers to create their own account and store information such as preferred addresses, transaction history, and shopping cart

Secure - the backend of Magento uses SSL security, as does the front end for order management, in addition to adhering to PCI compliance standards for customer data privacy

With the growth of eCommerce in Africa and worldwide, Magento has a variety of options to offer merchants looking to move into or expand their presence in the digital space.

Magento Commerce Cloud

Magento Commerce includes cloud hosting and deployment, support, business intelligence and sales acceleration tools as its integrated core out-of-the-box feature set. Because it is hosted in the cloud, costs associated with monitoring, maintaining, and hosting a solution in-house are eliminated. It also carries a small monthly fee, so costs are predictable and can be budgeted for. It is very customizable, allowing the platform to evolve along with the merchant business needs such as increased site traffic, and growth of multiple stores, brands, channels, or products.

Magento Business Intelligence Pro

Data analysis can be difficult to navigate and understand - many merchants don’t know where to begin on leveraging their database to understand their customer set and optimize their business accordingly. With Magento Business Intelligence Pro, merchants can control, manage, and visualize their data with easy to use report builders.

Magento Order Management

For merchants who have both online and in-store purchasing options, Magento Order Management helps create seamless customer experiences through the order fulfillment system. Features include:

Pre-order, backorder, returns, and refunds

Partial shipment and order splitting

Ship-from-store and ship-to-store

Buy online, pick up in-store

Delivery carrier integration

Global inventory management, including in-transit inventory

Order details/status

Order escalation

These and many other features help merchants become more efficient, increase sales, ensure seamless shopping experiences for customers, and reduce their TCO.

Magento Extensions

With over 3,500 extensions available, the Magento platform is seemingly endlessly customizable. And because the community is open source, extensions are regularly being developed, reviewed, and released. The out-of-the-box version of Magento will serve 90%+ of merchants very well, but occasionally, there are features that would be nice to have. The Extensions Marketplace makes it easy to add functionality to an eCommerce site.

Magento Open Source

The small and mid- to enterprise-sized business plans carry a cost for implementation and ongoing use. Magento Open Source is a free option for those who want to get started with the Magento eCommerce system.

Free, flexible, and open-source, Magento Open Source is great for merchants and developers. It is available to anyone who would like to download, install, and extend and offers:

Integrated checkout, payment processing, and shipping

Mobile optimized shopping for all major mobile browsers

Catalog management

Extended functionality via Marketplace (Extensions, mentioned above)

Global selling

Payment processing for eCommerceis a vital component of the business, and Magento has this covered as well. Accepting payments with Magento is easy, with integrated payment processing and acceptance of a wide range of payment options such as debit, credit, and COD.